Thursday 15 February 2024

RIP Charlotte Froese Fischer 1929–2024

 If Wikipedia is to be believed, then Charlotte Froese Fischer has died, aged 94.  I say "if it is to be believed" because I haven't seen any independent story about it, and the wikipedia author has no profile.  Still, it would be an odd thing to do, to update her page just to change some instances of "is" to "was" and include a year of death.

Like so many of this nearly-gone generation, Froese left eastern Europe due to political upheaval.  Born in what is now Ukraine, in the Donetsk region, her family left the Soviet Union on the last train allowed to depart for Germany in 1929 from where, rather fortunately given what was to come, they were soon granted a visa to go and settle in Canada.  Her scientific career started with her studies at the University of British Columbia where she was interested in mathematics and chemsitry.  She got interested in very early computers and got a PhD position with Douglas Hartree in Cambridge.  As computers got more advanced and portable programming languages, such as Fortran, appeared, she became a leader in computational chemistry, making a famous prediction, which was experimentally confirmed, that calcium can exist as a negative ion.  Normally calcium forms a positive ion by losing one or two electrons, since the outermost two electrons are rather weakly bound.  It turns out that subtleties of the interactions with an extra electron that gets added can lead to a surprisingly stable configuration.  

I don't think I ever met her, but I remember her being mentioned as a kind of guru when I worked at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the late 90s and she was at nearby (on an American scale) Vanderbilt University.  I was working with a group who were also very computationally-minded and I think there was some overlap or discussions with her that I was never part of. 

She wrote a nice autobiographical article in the journal Molecular Physics, published in 2000, which can be found online on her personal website at Vanderbilt.

Thursday 8 February 2024

The history of exchange forces

 I almost missed this paper submitted to to the history and philosophy section of arXiv last week, but picked it up when reviewing recent cross-post submissions to the nuclear theory section.  It is called "The development of the concept of exchange forces in the 1930s: close encounters between Europe and Japan and the birth of nuclear theory"

Aside from my general interest in history and the history of physics in particular, the last two words of the title definitely put it on-topic for my interests.  Hopefully I will get round to reading it, but thought it might be of enough interest to post here even before (if) I do read it.

Monday 22 January 2024

RIP Gottfried Münzenberg 1940–2024

 I copy and past below a press release from the FAIR facility at GSI, Darmstadt, Germany:

Press Release, 22 January 2024

Mourning for Gottfried Münzenberg 
 
GSI and FAIR mourn the loss of an outstanding scientist and pioneer of nuclear physics who shaped nuclear physics research at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung for decades. The former GSI division head Professor Dr. Gottfried Münzenberg passed away on January 2, 2024 at the age of 83.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg had a major influence on various areas of modern nuclear physics and leaves behind a significant scientific legacy. His diversified research work ranged from the study of exotic, very light nuclei to super-heavy nuclei, touching on both fundamental physical questions and practical applications. He laid important foundations for the extension of the GSI facilities, shaped the scientific program at the Super-FRS, contributed to the design of the new apparatus and initiated the founding of the NUSTAR collaboration at FAIR.
 
During his time at GSI, he made decisive contributions to the discovery of superheavy elements and played a leading role in the design and construction of the SHIP velocity filter at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. He was head of the SHIP experiment group for the synthesis of the new chemical elements bohrium, hassium and meitnerium and, as a member of the discovery team, was closely involved in the synthesis of the elements darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium. Münzenberg was also co-discoverer of the double magic nuclei tin-100 and nickel-78 as well as the proton halo in boron-8. Furthermore, his scientific commitment led to the discovery of over 220 new isotopes and more than 350 new mass measurements of various isotopes.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg gained worldwide international reputation as Professor of Experimental Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and head of the Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Chemistry departments at GSI. He initiated and fostered numerous international collaborations and was passionately committed to the promotion of young scientists.
 
For his outstanding scientific achievements, Gottfried Münzenberg has received many high-ranking awards and honors, including the Röntgen Prize of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, the Physics Prize of the German Physical Society, the Otto Hahn Prize of the City of Frankfurt, the Gold Medal of the Comenius University in Bratislava, the SUNAMCO Medal of the IUPAP, the Lise Meitner Prize of the European Physical Society and the Medal of Honor of the Hellenic Nuclear Physics Society.
 
GSI and FAIR will always remember Gottfried Münzenberg as an outstanding scientist, a valued source of inspiration, and above all as a great person full of warmth and with an incomparable sense of witty humor. His colleagues and friends will keep his wisdom, kindness and friendship in lasting memory. The management of GSI/FAIR extends its deepest condolences to his family.    

This press release with pictures is available on our website:


Wednesday 10 January 2024

@ The Nuclear Physics Community Meeting

 I'm on my way home from the UK Nuclear Physics Community meeting, which takes place every January and gives members of the academic nuclear physics community a chance to get together, update each other on research and community management matters, and to catch up with each other generally.  I've been part of the community since 2000 so I've got to know many of the people well and it was nice to see them.  Getting up to speed with latest new from STFC, from funding panels, and from research projects. If nothing else, I was prompted to send an email to offer collaboration on the calculation of octupole states, following having developed the ability to make the calculations, and then working with experimentalists at Surrey (see here). 

In the evening last night there was a pub reception and meal at a fancy restaurant, but I felt like I had done the socialising I wanted to, and joined my London quiz team for a match.  It was against the league leaders, and though I'm happy with how we did, we didn't manage to beat them.

Meanwhile, it's exam season at University so I've spent part of the last couple of days dealing with questions about Special Relativity for what will be my last time teaching it in its present form, thanks to some rearrangement of modules starting next year. 

Here are some photos from the last couple of days in London

My hotel with St Pancras Station's hotel

On the way to the quiz, the new developments around
King's Cross station


Sunday 31 December 2023

Books of 2023


 

I use the GoodReads app / website to keep track of books I am reading.  I kid myself that I will use it to write wise and interesting reviews of each book I read, but I rarely do so.  Here, however, is an attempt to give a very truncated mini-review of each book I read in 2023:

1. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: A book club obligation that was a kind of fun romp, set in a world adjacent to my own - scientists at Universities / research labs.  I didn't like the fantastic elements like the magic dog, and the plot was pretty ridiculous, with clichéd backstory and rather black and white portrayal of everything and everyone.  On one level, quite fun as mindless entertainment.

2. Solar by Ian McEwan: From a set of books with an environmental theme, though the environment is more of the backstory, while the book is about the people, their behaviour and their relationships.  More so than Lessons in Chemistry, this one had smatterings of my real life, with the main figure being a physicist.  The closeness to my own life was sometimes a bit uncomfortable: The physicist in the book is jerk, yet I could see parallels between my own life and his.  I used to read and enjoy Ian McEwan books around 30 years ago, and I do like his writing.  His portrayal of people and events is perceptive, though it feels to me like it is a kind of 30 year old, and more misogynistic way of writing than I have become used to in more recent years.  Is that just him portraying the world accurately?

3. The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi:  Another in the series of environmentally-tinged books.  In this case, it is set on the coast of Taiwan and the enviromental concerns are the inundation of land from the ocean, and an island of plastic and trash building up in the pacific.  In what seems like a more deliberate way than Lessons in Chemistry, the magic realism work well, and I felt immersed in the world of aboriginal Taiwan.

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë:  I have read this before, but this year I read it to my 9 year old.  Possibly too early to have read it to her partly for the language and partly for the plot.  She seems to enjoy more or less everything she experiences, and this book was no exception.  A favourite of mine, too.  One of the (many) upsides of having kids is reading old favourites to them.

5. The Men by Sandra Newman:  I love Sandra Newman's writing and I've picked up and read each of her last few new books (though I still haven't got a copy of her latest, Julia).  I enjoyed The Men well enough, though not as much as, say, The Heavens. It is a favourite genre of mine - feminist dystopia, of the sort that publishers seem to be churning out since the TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale.  Enjoyable writing by Newman, as always, and nice to see how she had the characters deal with the premise (the sudden disappearance of all men from the world), but with a so-so plot hanging the whole thing together.

6. The School For Good Mothers by Jesamine Chan:  A book club obligation, and another feminist dystopia.  This time supposing that the American state polices parental quality to an extent that parenting lapses are punished by removal of a child and compulsory attendance in parenting boot camp.  Much of it was plausible and scary enough, though there was (I think unintended) magic with technologically implausible 'dolls' which had to be cared for in the boot camp.  I didn't enjoy the book that much, having to read it, figuratively, through my fingers at times as one thing after another went wrong for the poor heroine of the story.   It did a good job of getting into my head, and I was a bit devastated by the outcome for the heroine and her training doll.

7. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:  This is what 9yo and I followed up Jane Eyre with.  I remember liking it a lot when I read it aged about 13.  Re-reading now, it was okay, but I saw neither the plot or the writing as exceptional.  Hard to judge older books which may have been groundbreaking and often emulated (and bettered).  Enjoyed reprising the kind of accent I used to hear when I lived in Tennessee.

8. Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh:  My first non-fiction book that I finished this year, which I actually started in 2022.  I was bought it as a present from my oldest daughter.  I recognised the author's name, recalling that he was a tutor at my Oxford college when I was there (and he still is).  Not that I ever knew him, as his politics and history did not overlap with my physics.  Very enjoyable book about a person and a piece of history about which I knew very litle.  Depressing to read it and reflect on the failed state that Haiti now seems to be. 

9. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk:  A present bought for me, but one I was looking forward to read.  I'd misplaced the book and it ended up taking longer to get the to the top of the pile.  Like many books, when I think back to reading it, I am transported to the place where I did much of the reading.  In this case, in a cramped fumey boat cabin where I lay quite ill while on holiday in Italy.  I think I had built up the book to be some kind of Tolstoyan epic covering lofty and broad ideas.  In fact, it's a darkly comedic book with an unreliable narrator whose character is the main draw, and the unfolding story a delight to read. 

10. Small Island by Andrea Levy:  A book club book.  I had tried to read this book once before, years ago.  This was in the days before kids when my partner and I would read a book out loud to each other.  I found the Jamaican Patois too hard to say out loud without me sounding silly.  Was no problem reading it and just having the words in my head.  It's set around the Second World War and features the lives of Jamaicans who come to the UK.  I can see why it was turned into a TV series, as the chapters are written as scenes, and the events are overdramatised.  Good fun.

11. The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:  As the shops in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon are closing down one by one, so the decaying branch of WH Smiths there has had a long-term sale of terrible books written and ghost written by minor celebrities.  Sometimes there are interesting books to be found there, and I picked up this for a pound or two, liking the sound of the investigative journalism looking at the transition of power by the Trump team (or effectively the lack of it).  I was drawn to it partly because of things to do with nuclear issues, so close to my work interests, though the book is broader, concetrating on several different goverment agencies, depening on testimony from a selection of people the author interviewed.  It reads like a half-written up summary of interview notes made by the author, in preparation for a fully-developed book, but was rather published quickly to get out there while it could still count as journalism.  Interesting, but would have rather read the full book, especially as I was reading it a couple of years after the event.

12. The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin:  I'd been bought these books (this is the first of a trilogy) by my ex-wife, whose taste I trust implicitly, and had slightly put of reading them by being a bit underwhelmed by another book of Jemisin's.  But this, and the following two books in the series, were great.  Glorious Sci-fi, exploring all the themes and beautifully written.

13. I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys:  A book club read.  This falls under Young Adult fiction, and is set in Romania during the last days of communism.  I remember that time well, following the news as it happened while I was a 15 year old - about the same age as the main protagonist in the novel.  The book has a compelling story, adroitly written in short chapters, developing the coming of age story intertwined with the historic events.  Full of pathos.  Waiting for the film adaptation.

14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain:  I remember thinking this much superior than the simpler and more childish Tom Sawyer book when I read it originally.  With the changes wrought in my by 30 years, I no longer see the distinction so clearly.  

15. Strange People I Have Known by Andy McSmith:  I used to enjoy reading Andy McSmith's journalism when I was a reader of the defunct paper-based Independent newspaper.  When I saw this memoir pop up I ordered it and devoured it pretty speedily.  I enjoy autobiographical work.  As long as the author appears to honestly reflect over events in their life, then the expert perspective usually makes for a very satisfying read that helps me understand what it is like to be (a) human (that is not me), which is the subtext for why I read anything, I suppose.  This book did not disappoint. Interesting anecdotes about political life over the last half century, from a personal perpective.

16. The Kingdom of the Sea by Zohra Nabi:  A children's book that my partner bought for my 9 year old.  Partner read it it 9yo and recommended it to me, so I read it.  A nice adventure story as a girl discovers a secret existence and makes here way from contemporary UK to a magic part of the Earth.  So many good kids books available these days.

17. You're a Bad Man Mr Gum! by Andy Stanton:  A book I read to my 6yo.  I knew I'd like it because I'd read it before to my now-9yo and my now-16yo enjoyed it when she was younger too.  It's a silly book, with silly names and silly things in it, but pulls of the brilliant trick of doing silliness well and making it a great please to read as an adult and to listen to as a child.  

18. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi:  A book club obligation.  I previously read his The Drowned and the Saved and became an instant fan of his writing.  He is able to portray great feeling with rather formal and even abstract writing, like no-one else I have read.  This book uses stories from Levi's life as a professional chemist to link together autobiographical stories.  A real pleasure (despite the bleak occurences - Levi was in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew).  I could have down withouth the pure fiction chapters which I didn't think were up to the standard of the autobiographical writing.

19. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin:  One of the zeitgeisty books that everyone seems to be reading.  I was keen to jump on the bandwagon, and found it to be a very intense bildingsroman as we follow some a group of self-centred children grow up into self-centred adults.  Some gratuitous tragic life story and this reads like a kind of junior version of A Little Life. 

20. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears:  I've had this sitting on my shelf since a friend of mine left in my house (accidently, I think) many years ago, and it never got returned (Sorry, Gwilym).  Every now and then I hear people rave about it, and so again this year when someone mentioned it on Twitter in glowing terms.  Finally, then, I read it, and I'd say it's worth the hype.  A very well-crafted historical novel with four different witnesses recalling a series of events taking place in and around Oxford in the 17th Century.  A highbrow page-turner that I finished as quickly as anything else I read this year, despite it probably being the longest fiction book I read.

21. Hard Times - Charles Dickens:  A book club choice.  We discussed the possibility of reading a Dickens book, and this came up as the choice, thanks to it being one of the shortest Dickens books, and we having a deadline to read it by.  I could have sworn I'd read the book before.  I knew all about Gradgrind and "Now, what I want is, Facts", but it turns out that was just through cultural osmosis and the book was largely new to me. I like reading Dickens, though I rather struggled to enjoy it to begin with, thanks I think largely to reading single chapters and half-chapters in snatched moments, only really getting long reading sessions towars the end, which I enjoyed much more

22. The Mystery of the Whistling Caves - Helen Moss:  The first of a series of advernture stories.  I read this to my 6yo.  This series features a pair of boys on holiday in Cornwall where they befriend a girl and her dog and together solve lots of criminal cases.  It is a modern-day Famous Five, more or less.  I enjoyed reading the books to the now 9-yo and now I am reading them the to 6yo.  I also read the next couple of books in the series, not listed separately here.

23. The Northern Lights - Phillip Pullman:  Again, with the excuse of reading books I like to my 9yo, I started reading the greatest set of recent children's books.  The books only came out when I was an adult and I remember first hearing about Northern Lights on Radio 4 many years ago when Pullman was being interviewed about it.  I thought it sounded intruiging and I bought a copy and greatly enjoyed it.  Truly a children's book which is not simply a childish pleasure for an adult, but a great book.  Also not listed seperately, we read The Subtle Knife.  Book 3 (The Amber Spyglass) we are part-way through.

24. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou: Somewhere high up on the list of iconic books that somehow I have not read yet.  Rectified this year, thanks to it being selected for a book club.  I was expecting to enjoy it more than I did.  The writing style left me cold much of the time, and the lack of narrative in what is ostensibly a chronological autobiography did not do much to draw me in.  Despite it being a surprising slog, I had warmed to it considerably by the end, though I don't think I'll be reading the follow up autobiographies.

25. Minor Detail - Adania Shibli:  I heard of this short novel through a report that its publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions was making the eBook free to read in response to the Frankfurt Book Fair withdrawing it from the shortlist for a prize, because it dealt with the historic Israel-Palestine conflict in a way sympathetic to Palestinian people.  The book gives a fictonalised account of the true story of the group rape and killing of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in 1949 and is written in two parts:  One, from the point of view of the leader of the soldier group in 1949, and the second from a Palestinian woman investigating the story today.  The prose in the first half is written in a very matter of fact and spare way, creating an odd effect for the subject matter.  I suppose it serves to dehumanise the victim from the point of view of the soldiers, though the lead soldier is not portrayed unsympathetically.  The voice changes for the second half, and the woman's inner monologue is centred as much on her own neuroses and difficulties in navigating life as it is on her investigation.  A book that will stay with me

26. My Fourth Time We Drowned - Sally Hayden:  I saw this come up on Twitter and fancied reading it, so I bought it and then tried to persuade the book group to pick it as one of our non-fiction books, but they wouldn't have something potentially so sad or harrowing.  I read it outside of book club, and learned a lot about the horror of the lives of those who try to migrate from Eritrea (mostly) to Europe via Libya.  In Libya they are detained by what amounts to a government, or controlling faction at least, in inhuman conditions, where their families are extorted.  All the while European countries and the UN contribute to the cruelty, coming out very badly from the whole sorry afair.  Vital reading for our times.

27. Flora and Ulysses - Kate DiCamillo: I started reading this to my 6yo, having bought it for my now-16yo years ago.  She didn't like it but I then read it to my now-10yo and she enjoyed it, as did I.  Now 6yo begged me to stop reading it after a while, but I finished it by myself, as I find it delightful.

28. A Shining - Jon Fosse:  A Christmas present which I read on Christmas Day.  Well, it's a short story or perhaps just about a Novella, coming in at around 50 pages.  50 pages of a single paragraph mind you, with the stream of consciousness of someone lost in the Scandinavian wilderness as they see (hallucinate?) a shining presence, then their own parents and then another being.  Fosse won the Nobel Prize for literature this year.  Enjoyable enough, but I'd take George Saunders for this kind of thing any day.

29. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:  Having read Hard Times, and pondered over the pile of unread Dickens books on my shelves, I started reading this, then carried on, then finished.  LIke Hard Times, I got increasingly more into in as I got through the book.  It ends up as quite an action packed adventure story: more like Hugo than Dickens, and certainly there are hints of Les Miseables (though that was published a couple of years after A Tale of Two Cities).  It does nothing to stop my slow and inexorable journey through all of Dickens novels.  

There we go.  In the end, perhaps not as "mini" for each review as intended.  Here's to 2024.

Wednesday 13 December 2023

Cultural activities with Kim Wilde

Last night I took my brother out for his birthday present:  A visit to Union Chapel in Islington to see Kim Wilde.  My brother and I both grew up in the heyday of Kim Wilde's pop startdom, and without either of us being superfans, we both enjoy 80s pop, and I rate Kids from America as well up there as a pinnacle of the genre.  Neither of us had been to the Union Chapel before.  It is a beautful building (see below) with wooden pews that were comfortable enough to sit on for the duration of the show (well, I'd just been on an LNER train for 2h before the gig, so it seemed pretty comfortable to me.  There's something very odd about the seats on those trains).

I was vaguely aware that Kim's brother Ricky is also a musician, but not aware that he wrote many of her hits and that they play together still.  I was glad to find out, as he was there last night and is an excellent musician and performer, and along with his daughter Scarlett Wilde and a fourth unrelated band member whose name I can't remember (sorry), they played a lovely acoustic show mixing up their own songs, and well-chosen cover versions which suited them well.  I was probably one of the only people in the room who used to be a serious fan of the German band Münchener Freiheit, and recognised and enjoyed hearing a version of their English language hit Keeping the Dream Alive.  They picked another favourite song of mine to cover: Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal, and they did a lot of Christmas songs.  

After booking the gig as a present for my brother, I had some doubts that it really was a good idea.  Would it be a dull affair watching an ex-star scrape together a show attended by a middle-aged audience who lacked the imagination to listen to contemporary music?  Fortunately not - the whole band was excellent, the music top quality, and the event was a pleasure to be part of. 



Friday 17 November 2023

Nuclear Physics @ SciPost


 

A few years ago, we were looking for somewhere to publish conference proceedings for a conference held at Surrey.  We went for SciPost Proceedings, for a variety of reasons.  Mainly it boiled down to the overall SciPost philosophy - that high-cost traditional journals do not justify their high-cost, and asking all our participants to pay an increased fee to publish the proceedings was not justified.  SciPost follows on from the existence of things like the arXiv, which runs at low enough cost that scientists can deposit unrefereed preprints of their articles there for no charge to the scientists, and from where they can be downloaded at no-cost to the reader.  SciPost adds, effectively, peer review to the system, and the uniformity and citeability of a journal style.  Really the main addition - peer review - is something that the high-cost journals get the academic community to do for free anyway.  With SciPost, at least the results of our free labour are free for all to see.

The SciPost family of journals started out with what is still the biggest one (in terms of articles published): SciPost Physics.  It accepts papers in all areas of physics, and follows the classification scheme originated by the arXiv.  So if your paper can be reasonably deposited in the physics part of the arXiv, then it can be legitimately submitted to SciPost Physics.  So far, there are rather few papers in SciPost Physics that come from nuclear physics, particularly the sort of low-energy nuclear physics that I work on.  BUT... I can announce that I have joined the Editorial College of SciPost and hope to encourage some nuclear physics articles to head there.  If you are a nuclear physicist looking for somewhere to publish your next article, please let me try to persuade you to use SciPost Physics!